Related papers: The deleterious mutation load is insensitive to re…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
Recent studies have shown that human populations have experienced a complex demographic history, including a recent epoch of rapid population growth that led to an excess in the proportion of rare genetic variants in humans today. This…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Non-African populations have experienced major bottlenecks in the time since their split from West Africans, which has led to the hypothesis that natural selection to remove weakly deleterious mutations may have been less effective in…
A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. However, many species are…
Most new mutations are deleterious and are eventually eliminated by natural selection. But in an adapting population, the rapid amplification of beneficial mutations can hinder the removal of deleterious variants in nearby regions of the…
The effects of inbreeding on human health depend critically on the number and severity of recessive, deleterious mutations carried by individuals. In humans, existing estimates of these quantities are based on comparisons between…
We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…
Most non-synonymous mutations are thought to be deleterious because of their effect on protein sequence. These polymorphisms are expected to be removed or kept at low frequency by the action of natural selection, and rare deleterious…
We investigate the effect of spatial range expansions on the evolution of fitness when beneficial and deleterious mutations co-segregate. We perform individual-based simulations of a uniform linear habitat and complement them with…
Linked beneficial and deleterious mutations are known to decrease the fixation probability of a favorable mutation in large asexual populations. While the hindering effect of strongly deleterious mutations on adaptive evolution has been…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
The vast majority of mutations are deleterious, and are eliminated by purifying selection. Yet in finite asexual populations, purifying selection cannot completely prevent the accumulation of deleterious mutations due to Muller's ratchet:…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
A phenomenon that strongly influences the demography of small introduced populations and thereby potentially their genetic diversity is the Allee effect, a reduction in population growth rates at small population sizes. We take a stochastic…
To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…